'hacking MS Word'

[ukbob]

Someone mentioned in the pie and piston, that word docs should be created from scratch, saying there was a way to revert a word.doc someone sent you to show the contents which were previously there. Im hoping someone will tell us all how

[pdV6]

If you have the "allow fast saves" option turned on, then nothing actually gets deleted from your document and the file grows as you edit it. Presumably this would make it possible to see all the content that has ever been in the file if you knew a bit about the file format.

[mattley]

Just open the document in notepad and you can see stuff that you thought you'd deleted. It's not particularly easy to read, but it's there.

[ukbob]

mattley said:

Just open the document in notepad and you can see stuff that you thought you'd deleted. It's not particularly easy to read, but it's there.

Is there nothing else to it? Open in notepad, by changing to .txt, or will that damage the word.doc?

[pmanson]

ukbob said:

mattley said: Just open the document in notepad and you can see stuff that you thought you'd deleted. It's not particularly easy to read, but it's there. Is there nothing else to it? Open in notepad, by changing to .txt, or will that damage the word.doc?

You could make a copy of the original then save the copy as .txt then you won't affect the original .doc

[mattley]

Just right click, Open with ......

You can of course mess up the document if you edit it and save so the above is all good.

[zumbruk]

A Google search for "Microsoft Word Metadata" is enlightening.

MS do a tool to strip all the metadata from a Word document to save embarrassment, and if I could
remember what it was called I'd tell you...

[kneedowndeano]

is this also true for excel files?

[mattley]

Yes, to an extent, but the actual data is so hard to extract from the raw file. Word files look like 10 tons of rubbish, with the text all crammed together, Excel files are really difficult to parse with the naked eye.

Can still give you the edge in those locked excel quizes though.